The chapter begins by looking into the absence of the noun frugalitas in authors before the first century BCE and traces the reasons for its rise to prominence as a virtue-label in Cicero. This involves consideration of the adjective frugi: primarily used of slaves and freedmen, it was adopted as an agnomen by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi (cos. 133 BCE) in an act of onomastic creativity. Piso’s integration of frugi into his nomenclature ennobled the attribute and thereby facilitated Cicero’s investment in the abstract noun: at two specific moments in his career, here analysed in depth, i.e. the speeches against Verres (70 BCE) and the Tusculan Disputations along with the speech on behalf of king Deiotarus (45 BCE), Cicero made the unorthodox decision to promote frugalitas as a quintessential Roman virtue, thereby setting the stage for its stellar career in imperial times and later centuries. The chapter concludes with a survey of the use authors of the early empire (Horace, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, Petronius, Seneca the Younger, Quintilian and Pliny the Younger) made of frugi, frugaliter and frugalitas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Republican Rome saw a range of laws designed to moderate the acquisition of wealth, and this chapter focuses on two such measures, the Lex Licinia de modo agrorum (367 BCE) and Tiberius Gracchus’ agrarian law of 133 BCE. In our later sources these two historical moments tend to be conflated, and the chapter begins by confronting the ensuing methodological problems. A critical review of the previous scholarship establishes that whereas the pre-Gracchan limit applied to all landholding not just public land, Gracchus, who was interested in reclaiming public land for distribution rather than putting a limit on elite wealth, revived the earlier limit, but applied it only to public land. These findings serve as basis for a discussion of the law carried by the tribune C. Licinius Stolo in 367 BCE, including the identification of an ‘ethos of frugality’ in mid-republican Rome which was meant to prevent individuals from accumulating excessive material resources. The final part of the chapter traces the history of the tension between the pursuit of personal enrichment and the interest of the wider community to keep such pursuits in check – an endeavour rendered increasingly difficult given Rome’s foreign conquests.