Debt and usury. Economic and financial questions in the Roman Republic (Fifth - First Century B.C.)

This chapter analyses the phenomenon of indebtedness and the practice of usury and their consequences on the roman society under the Republic. Sources are mainly textual and documentary. The passage from an agro-pastoral society, characterized by a pre-monetary and substantially closed economy, to an open mercantile society with the Mediterranean conquests changed the nature itself of debt, determining new forms of collection and resolution. In regard to usury, the Roman world had different attitudes. The term ‘fenus’ meant both a loan with interest payment—legal at determined rates—and usury. The precarity of the Roman economic system is highlighted by the complex anti-usury legislation issued in the second half of the fourth century B.C. Nonetheless, the practice of usury continued to thrive in the following centuries.