EARLY ITALIAN CRAFTMEN
For many, dependence on the rich and powerful was unavoidable. So long as communal organizations were relatively weak, only powerful families, with their many armed retainers, could offer protection from war and other forms of violence. Debt formed another route to dependency. In many societies of the ancient Mediterranean world, debt establishedand was intended to establish a long-term relationship between borrower and lender. Farmers who possessed only a small plot of land were highly vulnerable to crop failure, and they had great difficulty in assembling a surplus that would see them through bad years. In the semiarid environment of much of the Mediterranean basin, crop failures or low yields because of drought were fairly frequent, a circumstance that regular warfare could only aggravate.
Many men were forced to turn to their wealthier neighbors for assistance, borrowing to feed their families or to plant their next crop. Debt incurred in this fashion, it should be noted, would probably never be repaid; debtors would never gain enough wealth to repay in full, and they would continue to need further assistance in lean years. Instead, debt created a permanent relationship in which debtors lost control of their land and their labor, while creditors gained followers and a permanent workforce. In many early citystates of Greece and Italy, debt formed one of the chief sources of social conflict.The production of luxury goods, and trade in them too, probably focused on elite households. In the Mediterranean world of the time, the specialists who made the prestigious products desired by the rich and powerful were for the most part itinerant. Such specialists made their living, in other words, by moving from place to place, offering their services to the wealthy in each. While employed, they would be supported by their customers, who would maintain them in their households. In the seventh and sixth centuries, some producers of ceramics and metalwork certainly came to Italy from abroad, usually Greece, but on occasion from Phoenician areas too.
The leaders of some cities took a clear role in sponsoring and protecting long-distance trade, and the presence of foreign prestige items in sanctuaries and elite tombs confirms that local elites were eager to benefit from such trade. In the sixth century, Caere and Tarquinii set up secure locations in which foreign merchants could operate, and they also made treaties with other cities to protect shipping. The Greek city of Sybaris, moreover, founded dependent colonies at Laus, Scidrus, and Poseidonia on the west coast of the peninsula, so that merchants could travel from Sybaris to Campania and farther north by land, thus evading the tolls imposed by Rhegium on ships using the narrow straits between Sicily and Italy. One should not imagine, however, that the ruling elites of such cities participated personally in long distance trade.