sologdin’s Reviews > The Collapse of Antiquity > Status Update

Cicero’s ideal was for the economy to be debt-free, but at the cost of widespread forfeiture of land ownership at the expense of the indebted. That is indeed how the Roman Empire ended up.

In 104 the tribune L. Marcius Philippus complained that only two thousand Romans were left who owned any property.

all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offence, it seems, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor. This Roman fear of kingship is what Judea’s upper class played upon when they sought to have Jesus condemned after he incited the hatred of the Pharisees and the creditor class […]

the words for interest signified an offspring, such as a newborn goat (mash in Sumerian) or calf (tokos in Greek) […] All these words depicted the generation of interest as the birth of an offspring. Yet usury typically was personified as the opposite of procreation—as sodomy, or at best a sterile old man […] This sexual metaphor of homosexuality and the inability to procreate survived into medieval Europe.

This book finds even deeper seeds of antiquity's collapse: specifically, in the way it adopted interest-bearing debt around the 8th century BC from the Near East without the tradition of Clean Slates. That tradition of debt cancellation and restoration of land that debtors had lost was designed to restore social balance and block the mergence of creditor oligarchies[.]