to collect money due his company, had shut up the members of the Salaminian common council in their town hall until five of them died of starvation.  In domestic politics the companies played an equally important role.  The relations which existed between the “interests” and political leaders were as close in ancient times as they are to-day, and corporations were as unpartisan in Rome in their political alliances as they are in the United States.  They impartially supported the democratic platforms of Gaius Gracchus and Julius Caesar in return for valuable concessions, and backed the candidacy of the constitutionalist Pompey for the position of commander-in-chief of the fleets and armies acting against the Eastern pirates, and against Mithridates, in like expectation of substantial returns for their help.  What gave the companies their influence at the polls was the fact that their shares were very widely held by voters.  Polybius, the Greek historian, writing of conditions at Rome in the second century B.C., gives us to understand that almost every citizen owned shares in some joint-stock company[103].  Poor crops in Sicily, heavy rains in Sardinia, an uprising in Gaul, or “a strike” in the Spanish mines would touch the pocket of every middle-class Roman.

In these circumstances it is hard to see how the Roman got on without stock quotations in the newspapers.  But Caesar’s publication of the Acta Diurna, or proceedings of the senate and assembly, would take the place of our newspapers in some respects, and the crowds which gathered at the points where these documents were posted, would remind us of the throngs collected in front of the bulletin in the window of a newspaper office when some exciting event has occurred.  Couriers were constantly arriving from the agents of corporations in Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia with the latest news of industrial and financial enterprises in all these sections.  What a scurrying of feet there must have been through the streets when the first news reached Rome of the insurrection of the proletariat in Asia in 88 B.C., and of the proclamation of Mithridates guaranteeing release from half of their obligations to all debtors who should kill money-lenders!  Asiatic stocks must have dropped almost to the zero point.  We find no evidence of the existence of an organized stock exchange.  Perhaps none was necessary, because the shares of stock do not seem to have been transferable, but other financial business arising out of the organization of these companies, like the loaning of money on stock, could be transacted reasonably well in the row of banking offices which ran along one side of the Forum, and made it an ancient Wall Street or Lombard Street.