The chapter explores the styles of self-promotion available to elite Romans, ranging from frugal self-restraint and material sobriety to prodigial acts of civic generosity, and analyses the debates over and constraints on luxury and encouragement of frugality with respect to building projects and expensive heirlooms, not least those made of silver, from the late republic to the early imperial period. The chronologically and thematically wide-ranging investigation foregrounds in particular the enhanced social mobility that civil war and autocracy introduced into Roman society, including a discussion of why provincial newcomers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger affected particular enthusiasm for frugality and disapproved of luxury, as a way of positioning themselves as new arrivals within the ruling class of Rome.

The chapter traces the incorporation of the ideal of frugality in its sense of material sobriety, as devised especially by Cicero drawing upon the middle Stoa, into Christian thought and its subsequent ‘demoralisation’ by David Hume and Adam Smith on the grounds that luxury or opulence would enhance the overall material well-being of society. It argues that the two Scottish philosophers nevertheless partially re-incorporated ‘frugality’ in their system of thought as economic prudence directed to the acquisition of fortune as a way of sacrificing present advantage for greater return in future.

Summarizes the eighth century in Rome in terms of what had changed and what remained much the same.

The introduction begins with a discussion of previous scholarship on Roman frugality and a critique of its shortcoming. The second part consists of a theoretically informed reconsideration of frugality, which identifies four areas of special interest: (a) the lived realities and the husbandry of small-scale farmers and their discursive reflection in other settings; (b) ‘the frugal subaltern’: slaves and freedmen and their economic interests and acumen, as well as ‘the thrifty wife’; (c) Rome’s political culture, in particular its political economy, i.e. the interface of wealth and power; (d) the (literary/rhetorical) projects of specific individuals, not least those who invested in virtue signalling and shows of self-restraint in their self-promotion and/or authorial self-fashioning. The introduction concludes with a survey of the place and function of modes of moderation in Roman history and culture.

The chapter analyses Cato the Elder as the ‘inventor’ of a novel ethos of principled thrift and pride in peasant parsimony in response to the massive and unprecedented influx of war spoils and other riches into Rome in the first half of the second century BCE. It explores how Cato turned aspects of prudent and parsimonious husbandry as allegedly practiced by earlier generations of Roman peasants into a normative benchmark for all Romans, and in particular members of the senatorial elite and endowed his vision with authoritative and exemplary force by projecting it back into the past. The argument then shifts to resistance to this reconfiguration of material moderation as an ancestral ideal and concludes with a look at the self-promotion of Scipio Aemilianus, who aligns himself in some respects with the Catonian persona but distances himself from it in others, not least in his explicit if partial embrace of Greek culture – or rather those aspects of Greek culture that could be presented as compatible with Roman tradition.

Detailed examination of two building projects associated with Pope John VII (705–7); his funerary chapel in Old Saint Peter’s and the redecoration of the church of Santa Maria Antiqua. Prime attention is given to the cultural background of the decorations and the media employed.

This chapter reconsiders the transformation of smallholding in the late second century BCE in relation to developments within Rome’s political economy in the decades after the Second Punic War, which had profound repercussions on economic activity broadly conceived, perhaps even triggering an ‘economic revolution’. The discussion focuses chiefly on landholding during the Gracchan Age (133–120 BCE), with a specific emphasis on the recurrence of frugal ideals in the political debate arising from the Gracchan reforms and the role of smallholdings in the face of significant changes brought about by the emergence of large market-oriented estates and related developments, such as the rise in the price of land, increase in the number of slaves, the consequences of imperial plunder and tax-farming and the management of the grain supply and subsidies. The chapter pays equal attention to the ideological framework that defined smallholding in the Gracchan age and its practical consequences.

Examines the murals in the best-preserved chapel in S anta Maria Antiqua, dating from the time of Pope Zacharias (741–52) and dedicated to Saints Quiricus and Julitta. The chapel is important as being the first early medieval example of lay patronage in Rome, and the focus of discussion is the donor, Theodotus, named in the painted inscriptions and depicted with other members of his family, a former military commander who switched to papal service and also played a major role in the development of the ‘idiaconiae’ (welfare stations). A case is presented for the hellenophone origins of the family, our best documented example of Rome’s new landowning élite.

The chapter opens with a discussion of the methodological challenges involved in the study of a society for which we have very few contemporary literary sources, before exploring the dynamic intersections of wealth and power in archaic Rome with special attention to changes over time, primarily on the basis of archaeological evidence. The discussion considers the noticeable shift in the display of wealth from funerary settings to housing, stimulated by the introduction of the census; limits on the degree of ostentation on the part of rich and powerful members of the archaic Roman community; and protection against the dissipation of patrimony. In the final part, the focus shifts to the lower end of the social spectrum with a reconstruction of the lifestyle of a typical Roman farmer in the archaic period, with particular reference to calorific needs and allotment size.

Surveys political events in the second half of the eighth century as Rome, in the face of continued Lombard attacks, shifts its political ties from the emperor in Constantinople to the Franks, culminating with the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman ‘emperor’ in December 800