“Trusts” founded to control prices troubled the Romans, as they trouble us to-day.  There is an amusing reference to one of these trade combinations as early as the third century before our era in the Captives of Plautus.[104] The parasite in the play has been using his best quips and his most effective leads to get an invitation to dinner, but he can’t provoke a smile, to say nothing of extracting an invitation.  In a high state of indignation he threatens to prosecute the men who avoid being his hosts for entering into an unlawful combination like that of “the oil dealers in the Velabrum.”  Incidentally it is a rather interesting historical coincidence that the pioneer monopoly in Rome, as in our day, was an oil trust—­in the time of Plautus, of course, an olive-oil trust.  In the “Trickster,” which was presented in 191 B.C., a character refers to the mountains of grain which the dealers had in their warehouses.[105] Two years later the “corner” had become so effective that the government intervened, and the curule aediles who had charge of the markets imposed a heavy fine on the grain speculators.[106] The case was apparently prosecuted under the Laws of the Twelve Tables of 450 B.C., the Magna Charta of Roman liberty.  It would seem, therefore, that combinations in restraint of trade were formed at a very early date in Rome, and perhaps Diocletian’s attempt in the third century of our era to lower the cost of living by fixing the prices of all sorts of commodities was aimed in part at the same evil.  As for government ownership, the Roman state made one or two essays in this field, notably in the case of mines, but with indifferent success.

Labor was as completely organized as capital.[107] In fact the passion of the Romans for association shows itself even more clearly here, and it would be possible to write their industrial history from a study of their trades-unions.  The story of Rome carries the founding of these guilds back to the early days of the regal period.  From the investigations of Waltzing, Liebenam, and others their history can be made out in considerable detail.  Roman tradition was delightfully systematic in assigning the founding of one set of institutions to one king and of another group to another king.  Romulus, for instance, is the war king, and concerns himself with military and political institutions.  The second king, Numa, is a man of peace, and is occupied throughout his reign with the social and religious organization of his people.  It was Numa who established guilds of carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, tanners, workers in copper and gold, fluteplayers, and potters.  The critical historian looks with a sceptical eye on the story of the kings, and yet this list of trades is just what we should expect to find in primitive Rome.  There are no bakers or weavers, for instance, in the list.  We know that in our own colonial days the baking, spinning, and weaving were done at home, as they would naturally have been when Rome