ABSTRACT
LIKE that of industry, the growth of trade in Rome was slow. The reasons were the same—the simplicity of primitive civilization and its few needs, the existence of a self-sufficing unit of domestic labour, the deliberate concentration of all activities upon agricultural or pastoral pursuits and the general lack of consideration for all activities other than tilling the soil. In the earliest times, however, Rome was only deprived of trade in so far as she had prevented manufacture from leaving the landed estates. Economic rules are never so absolute that they do not permit of deviation in certain directions. There was a Roman trade in the eighth and the seventh centuries just as there were infant industries in the days of Numa. But the trade, like the industries, was scanty and restricted and its usages—like the processes of metal-working, pottery, or dyeing—were imported from abroad. The traditions of Rhodes, the technical language of Graecia Magna and Sicily, imposed themselves upon the city of the Tiber, which moreover only acquired at a late period a distinct class of traders in the strict sense of the word. Primitive barter rendered impossible any economic division, which is only suited to a relatively developed society.
