Although the city of Rome began as a poor community on the hills along the Tiber River, its slow but steady domination of the Italian Peninsula and its rather swift conquest of the Mediterranean made Rome immensely wealthy. The territories acquired in Spain, North Africa, and Greece within 70 years (202–133 BCE) had thrust upon Rome a fortune that it had little time to understand or to incorporate. Moreover, the absence of any foreign foe of any magnitude put Rome in an unprecedented space. A generation or two before, Rome had been but one of several powerful Mediterranean states, but by 133 BCE Rome was the master of the Mediterranean, even if it did not control and occupy the entire land mass. The Romans had some breathing room and some time to ponder the new landscape, which would be an idyllic way to put it. Another way to put it is that Rome could no longer ignore the domestic concerns that had developed out of this rapid conquest and infusion of wealth. How would they do? Well, as it turned out, the Romans themselves accomplished what the Greeks and Carthaginians could not do: they brought down the Roman Republic.

The Romans had always thought of themselves as simple agricultural people. Even if the stories of early Romans were over-romanticized, there is no question that the Romans included in their legal code the restriction of certain kinds of ostentatious displays of wealth. The Twelve Tables, Rome's earliest code of laws, restricted the conspicuous display of wealth at funerals. Subsequent laws sought to address public luxury and opulence in other areas, such as the amount of money spent on entertainment and banquets. Why did the Romans pass these laws? A cynical, though accurate, view would be that people must have been conspicuously displaying their personal wealth. But why did the Romans think that was a bad thing? In modern capitalist countries, such public displays of one's personal wealth are often considered a virtue, whether they truly are or not. The Romans, however, understood the capacity wealth had to tear the state apart. First, luxury had the power to seduce citizens to pursue private wealth over the common good and then to use that wealth to consolidate political power.