The age of Augustus and the century that followed were a time of relative prosperity. Italy and the regions affected by the civil wars recovered quickly, and neither Augustus nor his successors afflicted their subjects with excessive taxation. Their policies were conducive to economic growth, because the pax romana, by uniting the western world under a single government, limited warfare to the periphery of the empire and created a market of unprecedented size. Tariffs on the transfer of goods between provinces generated revenue but were too low to inhibit trade. For the first and last time in its history, the west had uniform coinage and systems of banking and credit that transcended national boundaries.

The policy of settling veterans on land of their own, though it sometimes dispossessed existing farmers, may also have temporarily improved the well-being of the peasant class. The initial effect of these resettlements was to reduce the number of latifundia, or great slave-worked estates. Many regions saw a resurgence of the small independent farm, while middling properties of the kind described by Cato prospered. The number of slaves declined, in part because the annexations of Augustus did not involve the large-scale enslavement of new subjects, and in part because manumission was common. On the estates that remained, the treatment of slaves appears to have improved. Slaves grew more valuable as the supply dwindled, and owners found that they could best be replaced by encouraging them to reproduce. The Augustan age did not see a resumption of the three Servile Wars, such as the slave rebellion led by the gladiator Spartacus, fought during the last century of the republic.

In time, however, the economies of scale that had doomed the small farmers of the republic reasserted themselves. Not every veteran understood agriculture; those who did could not always compete with their larger neighbors. Eventually, these men or their descendants sold their farms and returned to the city, or they became tenants (coloni) of the great estates. In the early empire, coloni remained technically free, leasing their land and returning a portion of the yield to the estate owner. This was thought to be less efficient than slavery, but it became increasingly common as slaves grew scarcer. Once again the average size of properties began to grow and peasant income resumed its decline. By the end of the first century A.D. half of the land in the province of Africa was owned by six men.

Changes in the distribution of wealth were therefore both temporary and relative. If veterans benefited from the distribution of land and from cash payments derived from booty, the wealthy gained even more from imperial gifts. Townspeople, too, received payments from the emperors as a kind of bribe for good behavior and sometimes found work on the construction projects funded by Augustus from the spoils of Egypt. Another burst of prosperity seems to have followed the great fire of A.D. 67, which destroyed much of Rome; Nero financed a massive reconstruction that gave work to thousands. Temporary benefits of this kind may have improved the lives of ordinary people, especially in Italy, but the amounts involved were too small to expand significantly their role as consumers or to change the basic distribution of wealth. . . .

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