C. Crepereius Gallus and his Gens

Abstract

During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, Italian business-men swarmed into newly acquired provinces and lands that had fallen under Roman influence. Sometimes they settled abroad with their families and, as landowners, obtained a form of wealth that raised them in the social scale. At the end of the second century B.C. Italians began to emigrate and become landowners in another way—by the foundation in the provinces of colonies, veteran and civilian. It was Gaius Gracchus who initiated colonization overseas, and it remained a radical, controversial policy—but an indispensable one. Both forms of emigration kept up their momentum until the Imperial age. As they passed through the empire or settled abroad, families of Italian negotiatores and colonists left evidence of their movements, mainly in the form of inscriptions. Under the Caesars we may, in some cases, trace their progress in reverse: the descendants of Italian émigrés—negotiatores, colonists, and landowners—returned to Italy and held posts to which some at any rate of their ancestors could never have aspired.

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