From Robert Graves’ second book that poses as an autobiography of Emperor Claudius (or, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus; or Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus), Claudius the God:
In my self-confident ignorance I did one particularly stupid thing: I listened to Messalina’s [his wife] advice on the subject of monopolies. (. . .) She said to me one day: ‘Claudius, I have been thinking about something; and that is, that the nation would be much more prosperous if competition between rival merchants were to be supressed by law.’
“‘What do you mean, my dear?’ I asked.
‘Let me explain by analogy. Suppose that in our governmental system we had no departments. Suppose that every secretary in this place were free to move from job to job just as he thought fit. Suppose that Callistus were to come rushing into your study one morning and say: “I got here first and I want to do Narcissus’s secretarial work this morning,” and then Narcissus, arriving a moment later and finding his stool occupied by Callistus, were to dash into Felix’s room, just in time to anticipate Felix, and begin work on some foreign affairs document (. . .) That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?’
‘Very ridiculous. But I don’t see what this has to do with merchants.’
‘I’ll show you. The trouble with merchants is that they won’t stick to a single task or let their rivals stick to one. None of them is interested in serving the community, but merely in finding the easiest way of making money. (. . .) Trade is constant fighting, and the mass of the population suffers from it, just like non-combatants in a war.’
‘Do you really think so? Often they get things surprisingly cheap when one merchant is underselling another merchant or when he goes bankrupt.’
‘You might as well say that sometimes non-combatants can get quite good pickings from a battle-field — scrap metal, the hides and shoes of dead horses (. . .) Those windfalls aren’t to be reckoned against the burning of their farms and the trampling down of their crops.’
‘Are merchants as bad as all that? They never struck me as anything but useful servants of the State.’
‘They could be and ought to be useful. But they do great harm by their lack of co-operation and their insane jealous competition. The word goes round, for example, that there’s to be a demand for coloured marble from Phrygia, or Syrian silk (. . .) and for fear of missing a chance they scramble for the market like mad dogs. Instead of persisting with their ordinary lines of commerce, they rush their ships to the new center of excitement, with orders to their captains to bring as much marble, pepper, silk, or ivory as possible at whatever cost, and then of course foreigners raise the prices. Two hundred ship-loads of pepper or silk are brought home at great expense when there is really only demand for twenty, and the hundred and eighty ships could have been far better employed in importing other things for which there would have been a demand and for which a fair price could have been got. Obviously trade ought to be centrally controlled in the same way as armies and law-courts and religion and everything else is controlled.’
The result, of course, was a combination of high prices, shortages (causing famine), and several merchants putting huge sums into the pockets of Messalina. It takes Claudius a year or two to reverse his monopoly laws, and even longer for a general economic order to restore itself in Rome.
