Abstract
Abstract Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This article examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
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