A famous French scholar had this to say about women and
finance in Ancient Rome. "One of the most curious characteristics of that age was that the women appear as much engaged in business and as interested in speculations as the men. Money is their first care. They work their estates, invest their funds, lend and borrow.” The author goes on to explain that the famous
Roman orator Cicero, no less, both borrowed from and loaned to women.[i]
The Romans, as the polymath UC Berkeley Professor Ulrike
Malmendier points out, were the first to develop what we today call the
corporation. The Latin term was “Societas
Publicanorum”. If the concept of a publicly-traded company “marks the
height of the evolution of business organizations,” as Professor Malmendier
states, then Roman business had made remarkable strides just a few hundred
years after the origin of the Oracle at Delphi. Moreover, according to
Professor Malmendier, Romans also created the innovation of “paretes” – publicly traded shares in
corporations.[ii]
Frustratingly, while she underscored the unique contribution
to financial history of these Roman financial innovations, nowhere does
Professor Malmendier describe a woman’s involvement. But since in citing her
examples she quotes Cicero, and since Cicero himself cites female involvement
in the business world it is difficult to believe that no woman participated in
the “speculations as the men” in the paretes
of the Societas Publicanorum.
Much of my reasoning here is based on a simple fact. During
much of this period although Greek culture (which did not explicitly permit
gender equality) was pre-eminent, by 100 B.C. Rome was the financial capital of
the European world. And it was Roman might and rights enabled free trade to
flourish.
On the ‘rights’ side of that successful equation were
generous rights to women. Some of these rights vanished with Rome’s empire. For
example, women could own property and although not able to vote, they were not
subject to taxes on their wealth. Naturally, fathers, husbands, brothers and
sons sought to exploit this legal loophole. So much so that “by 169 B.C. so much
property had passed into the hands of women that the law forbade a man to will
as much as half his property to women.”[iii]
This law was later abolished. When Rome fell in 476 AD many
of the Greco-Roman contributions in arts, the sciences, and, of course, finance
were lost. Fortunately, and at almost the same time, a new Female Financial First
was being created in Rome’s backyard – a satellite civilization on the
Mediterranean littoral 2000 years ago that absorbed Greco-Roman influences:
Cleopatra’s Egypt.
Endnotes
[i]
Gaston Boissier, Cicero and His Friends: A Study of Roman Society in the
Time of Caesar, (Londoin, A.D. Innes & Co, 1897) Questia online
edition http://www.questia.com/read/10552570/cicero-and-his-friends-a-study-of-roman-society-in Accessed May 14, 2013
[ii] See Ulrike Malmendier, “Roman Shares,” pp.31-42,
in Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital
Markets, William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, Eds., (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
[iii]
Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, (New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 2011), p.46
Copyright 2013 by David Baeckelandt. Sorry folks but all rights reserved. No reproduction in any form without my express, written permission.
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