How Ancient Romans Faked Being Rich

Walk into a rich Roman house and look at the walls. Big blocks of coloured stone, deep green and deep red, veined and polished. Now put your hand on it.

It is plaster. It was built up in layers, sometimes seven coats, with crushed marble in the top ones so it would catch the light like the real thing.

This is the oldest Roman wall style we have. Before scenes and gardens, the first thing Romans painted was fake stone.

Rome priced its ranks

Rome did not just have rich and poor. It had ranks, and each rank had a price. To be a knight you needed 400,000 sesterces in property.

A rank is only worth something if it shows. A law of 67 BC gave the knights the first 14 rows of the theatre.

Everybody arrived together and watched everybody sit. Where you sat said what you were worth, in front of the whole city. The theatre was a public reading of your accounts.

The key that fell

People sat in rows they had not paid for, often enough that ushers were employed to check.

The poet Martial wrote about it. In one poem a man sits in the knights' rows, dressed correctly, telling people he is worth 200,000 a year. Then a large key falls from his clothes.

Heavy keys were carried by the people who worked for owners, not by owners. The whole row understood at once.

Martial wrote jokes, not court records. He may have invented it. But nobody jokes about a thing nobody does.

How to fake it

• The ring. A gold ring was the badge of the knights. A man borrowed one for the morning and gave it back.
• The silver. Plate for a dinner party was hired for the night and gone by morning.
• The crowd. A rich man had people walking behind him. A poor man arranged a group anyway, with friends or hired men.

None of it was owned. All of it was timed for the moment it would be seen.

Trimalchio

The most famous fake rich man in Rome is a character in a novel. Trimalchio was born a slave, was freed and made a fortune.

At his endless dinner there is a clock, and a trumpeter who sounds the hour. The food is all tricks. He tells you the price of everything, reads out what he owns, and designs his own tombstone while the guests eat.

The joke is not that he is poor. He is not. The joke is that he does not know the quiet rules.

The quiet rules

Old Roman families had a style: land, plain clothes and very few words about it. They looked down on anybody who told you what they owned.

The people doing the telling were often freed slaves who were very good at business. They had more money than the old families, but their birth was in their name for ever. Showing it was the only lever they had.

That is a trap. Win quietly and nobody knows you. Win loudly and you are rude. The rule was written by people already inside.

What keeping up cost

The toga was heavy white wool. You could not work in it, it showed dirt at once, and cleaning it was a paid trade.

You needed it for the morning greeting, when you queued at a richer man's door at dawn and were seen queuing. You might be handed a basket of food or a few coins. The clothes cost more than the handout.

And you could not stop, because stopping was visible. So people borrowed money in order to look as if they did not need to borrow.

The laws that failed

Rome capped what a dinner could cost, how many guests you could feed and how much silver a house could hold. The point was to hide the gap.

We know it did not work because new laws kept being passed for centuries. A law that works does not need rewriting.

The short answer

The rule was never about the object. It was about being seen to have it. You cannot outlaw wanting that. Rome tried, wrote it down, and failed.