My new Commander of the Guards was called Justus; I had called up the other Guards colonels to suggest one of their number for the appointment, and though I would have preferred someone other than Justus I accepted their choice. Justus took too meddling an interest in politics for a mere soldier: for instance, he came to me, one day and informed me that some of the new citizens I had created were not adopting my name, as they should do in loyalty, or altering their wills in my favour, as they should do in gratitude. He had a list already prepared of these ungrateful and disloyal men and asked whether I wished to have charges framed against them; I silenced him by asking him whether his recruits made a practice of adopting his name and altering their wills in his favour. Justus took the trouble to tell me this, but neither he nor anyone else let me know that not only was Messalina selling the citizenship and encouraging others to sell it; but, more shameful still, was being paid huge sums of money in return for her influence with me in the choice of magistrates, governors, and military commanders. In some cases she not only exacted the money but I might as well tell you at once insisted on the man sleeping with her as a seal to the bargain. The most shameful thing of all was that she brought me into it without my knowledge: telling them that I had cast her off in scorn of her beauty, but allowed her to choose what bed-fellows she liked on condition that she persuaded them to pay a good price for the appointments which I gave her to sell on my behalf ! However, I knew nothing about any of this at the time, and flattered myself that I was doing well enough and acting in an upright way that should command the affection and gratitude of the whole nation.
In my self-confident ignorance I did one particularly stupid thing: I listened to Messalina's advice on the subject of monopolies. You must remember how clever she was and how slow-witted I was, and how much I relied on her: she could persuade me to almost anything. 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 suppressed 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 Felix had not quite finished drawing up the night before. 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. A merchant may start with an inherited business as a wine-importer, and manage that soberly for a while, and then suddenly break into the oil-business, underselling some old-established firm in his neighbourhood; perhaps he will force this firm out of business or buy it up, and then perhaps dabble in the fig-trade or slave-trade and either crush competitors or get crushed himself. 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, enough sound parts of broken chariots to build one good one with. 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 being anything but useful servants of the State.'
'They could be and ought to be useful. But they do great harm j 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, or ivory from Africa, or Indian pepper; 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 centre of excitement, with orders to their captains tobring as
much marble, pepper, silk, or ivory as possible at whatever cost; and then of course the foreigners raise the prices.' Two hundred shiploads of pepper or silk are brought home at great expense when there is really only a 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.'
I asked her how she would control trade if I gave her the chance.
`Why, that's simple enough,' she answered. `I should grant monopolies:'
`Caligula granted monopolies,' I said, `and sent prices up with a rush.'
'He sold monopolies to the highest bidder, and of course prices went up. I shouldn't do that. And my monopolies wouldn't be so huge as Caligula's. He sold one man the world's trading-rights in figs! I'd simply calculate a normal year's demand: for any given commodity and then freely allocate that trade for the next two years to one firm or more of traders. I should, for instance, grant the sole right to import and sell Cyprian wines to such-and-such a firm, and the sole right to import and sell Egyptian glass to such-and-such a firm; and Baltic amber and Tyrian purple and British enamel would go to other firms. Control trade like this and there is no competition, so the foreign manufacturer or dealer in raw materials can't put up the price; "take, it or leave it", says the trader, as he fixes the price himself. The traders who have not sufficient standing to be granted monopolies must either come to terms with monopoly-holders, if the latter think that they have more trade than they can manage themselves,, or must discover new industries or trades. If h had my way everything would be thoroughly orderly and we should be well supplied, and the State would get bigger harbour-dues than ever.'
I agreed that it sounded a very sensible plan; and one good effect would be to release a large number of ships and merchants for the corn trade. I immediately empowered her to grant a large number of monopolies, never suspecting that the clever woman had talked me over to her scheme merely with an eye to enormous bribes that she would get from the merchants. Six months later the removal of competition in the monopoly trades, which included necessaries as well as luxuries, had sent prices up to a most ridiculous height the merchants were recovering from the consumers what they had paid in bribes to Messalina - and the City became more restless than at any time since the famine-winter. I was continually shouted at in the streets by the crowd, and there was nothing for me to do but to set up a-big platform on Mars Field, from which, with the help of a big-voiced Guards captain, I fixed the prices, for the ensuing twelve months, of the commodities affected. I based the prices on those of the previous twelve months, as far as I was able to get accurate figures and then of course all the monopolists came to the Palace afterwards to beg me to modify my decision in their own particular cases, because they were poor men and beggary was facing their starving families, and nonsense of that sort. I told them that if they could not make their monopolies pay at the prices now fixed they could retire in favour of other traders with better business methods; and then warned them to go away at once before I charged them with `waging war against the State' and threw them from the Capitoline cliff. They made no further protests but tried to beat me by withdrawing their goods from the market altogether. However, as soon as any complaints reached me that a certain class of goods, say pickled fish from Macedonia or medicinal drugs from Crete - was not reaching the City in sufficient quantities I added another firm to those already sharing the monopoly.