I studied Latin for five years. Early on I learned how many Latin words had evolved into English. Soon I graduated to Book Two of the Aeneid and, being a teenage boy, I relished Virgil’s description of “twin, red-crested horrors” — sea serpents that slithered from the surf and wound crushing coils around the Trojan priest Laocoön and his hapless sons. By Jupiter, how I feasted on juicy stuff like that.
Having settled into my senior years, what I want to know now is how Romans got rich and managed their investments. Thanks to Luca Grillo, a Notre Dame professor of classics, I’ve learned clever tips from ancient moneymen. I hope such wisdom will keep me in good favor with the gods of finance and far from debt’s asphyxiating embrace.
Grillo’s How to Make Money: An Ancient Guide to Wealth Management is the latest in a series of pocket-sized hardback books from Princeton University Press. The works have an ingenious concept. In addition to Grillo’s commentary, the original Latin by luminaries like Livy and Plutarch appears with his translations on facing pages, allowing scholars and students alike to navigate easily between the two. Other scholars’ contributions to the Princeton series include practical — and surprising — entries such as How to Be Healthy by the physician Galen and How to Tell a Joke by the otherwise serious senator and orator Cicero.
Trying to make money with stocks, bonds or CDs has often made me feel as though the laugh were on me, so I came to Grillo hopeful he and his sources would reveal how to make torrents of silver sestertius coins cascade my way. Here, he writes, introducing his topic, is a “collection of texts which, like fossils, reveal traces of life crystallized from a different era. . . . This encounter may reveal many unexpected differences and similarities to our world.”
Rome had no stock market. Romans often made fortunes in dirty ways — literally and morally. (Grillo tells us that gambling, for instance, was “highly popular.”) Agriculture dominated Rome’s economy, and its citizens held farmers in the highest esteem. Doctors and lawyers ranked lower, and estate-owning elites pitied poor salaried workers. Sniffed Cicero: “The very wage is a like a bond of slavery.”
Laborers received a mere munus, or “gift,” from which we get the word “remuneration.” By contrast, our more highfalutin word “pecuniary” derives from pecus, which meant “cattle,” a valuable rural commodity. Rome’s mint was associated with a temple of Juno Moneta, the goddess of good counsel; thus from the name Moneta springs our word “money.” Of course, “salary” comes from salarium, funds allotted to troops so they could pay for all-important salt.
Advice on buying good agricultural land — or any type of property — is the same today as it was then. “Don’t be emotional; don’t refrain from careful examination; don’t be satisfied with one tour of the property . . . pay attention to the neighbors: are they thriving?” wrote the historian Cato the Elder in De Agricultura.
Back then people also borrowed money to buy property, sometimes by methods as unwise then as they are now. A seemingly naïve Pliny the Younger told his friend Calvisius Rufus, “I can take out a loan without a problem. I plan to borrow from my mother-in-law, whose account I can access as easily as my own.”
Romans loved risk-takers. No wonder: It took courage, steel, blood and sweat to build an empire that would endure nearly 1,500 years. By the second century of the Christian era, Roman ships ferried grain, wine, olive oil, pottery and glass from Morocco to Armenia and Iraq to Spain, Grillo writes. A universal currency and unified system of laws and regulations governing business throughout the provinces sped the sails of trans-Mediterranean transactions.
In the picaresque novel Satyricon, Petronius puts words in the mouth of the swashbuckling, self-made merchant Trimalchio that could have been said by a modern-day Musk or Gates. After “Neptune gulped up” five of his vessels loaded with wine, bacon, beans, ointments and slaves, Trimalchio moans that he lost 30 million sestertii, perhaps the equivalent of $75 million today. Not to worry. His high-rolling, luxury-loving wife Fortunata then “sold all her clothes and gold and put 100 gold coins right in my hand. This was the yeast of my property. What the gods wish happens quickly; in one trip I made ten million. . . . Whatever I touched grew just as a honeycomb.”
Of course, not every Roman fortune was made so legitimately. Elites vied for public favor (and to tamp down unrest) by staging increasingly elaborate games to placate the peons of Rome’s stinking slums. But to do so for profit and on the cheap was frowned upon, especially if something went awry. Woe to a sponsor of combat like Atilius, who in A.D. 27 tossed up a ramshackle coliseum near Rome. “He wanted to offer games as a base means to make money, not because he already had plenty of money or because he wanted to advance his public career,” writes the historian Tacitus. “The construction turned in on itself, then it shattered and collapsed. . . . Fifty thousand were mutilated or killed.” As punishment, Atilius was exiled.
Grillo also explores far more wretched ways fortunes were made such as pimping and selling slaves, avocations Romans held in contempt even though they may have benefited from them. Of this trade in human flesh, Grillo ends on a hopeful note with a fifth-century letter by St. Augustine:
In truth, it is impossible to tell how many, blinded by greed as if by a contagious disease, have flocked into this despicable trade. . . . Can you believe that a farmer in our church, a respectable guy, sold his wife, the mother of his children, who had done nothing wrong, just because he was stirred by this raging pestilence? Even if I wanted to, there is no way I could list all the crimes of this sort that I personally witnessed.
When Christians in Augustine’s hometown, the port of Hippo in modern-day Algeria, learn traffickers have herded slaves there for shipment to distant markets, the theologian and bishop recounts that “right away” the local congregation freed them. “I am talking about 120 [slaves], and it turned out that only five or six among them had been legally sold by their parents. Barely anyone could refrain from tears upon hearing the various vicissitudes of others, how they were misled and seized.”
As it turned out, a man who had only the clothes on his back and cared nothing for money had a better “investment” philosophy than anything pagan Rome could offer. Alas, Jesus’ exhortation in the Gospel of Matthew does not appear in Grillo’s book: “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” he preached. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
George Spencer is a freelance writer from Hillsborough, North Carolina. His book, When Memory Fades: What to Expect at Every Stage, from Early Signs to Full Support for Alzheimer’s and Dementia, co-written with geriatrician Dr. Nathaniel Chin, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in June 2026.