Alimenta

The alimenta was a Roman welfare program that existed from around 98 AD to 272 AD. According to most modern historians, including Nerva biographers Nathan Elkins and John Grainger, it was initiated by emperor Nerva and expanded by Trajan. It helped orphans and poor children throughout Italy. It provided general funds, as well as food and subsidized education. The program was supported out of Dacian Wars booty and by a combination of estate taxes and philanthropy. In general terms, the scheme functioned by means of mortgages on Italian farms (''fundi''), through which registered landowners received a lump sum from the imperial treasure, being in return expected to pay yearly a given proportion of the loan to the maintenance of an alimentary fund. The program was likely terminated by emperor Aurelian following his triumph.

Goals

Although the system is well documented in literary sources and contemporary epigraphy, its precise aims are controversial and have generated considerable dispute among modern scholars, especially about its actual aims and scope as a piece of welfare policy. It is usually assumed that the program was intended to bolster citizen numbers in Italy, following the provisions of Augustus' moral legislation (''Lex Julia'') favouring procreation on moral groundssomething openly acknowledged by Pliny. Nevertheless, this reproductive aim was anachronistic, based as it was on a view of the Roman Empire as centered on Rome and Italy, with a purely Italian manpower base, both increasingly no longer the case. This outdated stance was confirmed by Pliny when he wrote that the recipients of the ''alimenta'' were supposed to people "the barracks and the tribes" as future soldiers and electorstwo roles ill-fitted to the contemporary reality of an empire stretching across the entire Mediterranean and ruled by an autocrat. The fact that the scheme was restricted to Italy suggests that it might have been conceived as a form of political privilege accorded to the original heartland of the empire. According to the French historian Paul Petit, the ''alimenta'' should be seen as part of a set of measures aimed towards the economic recovery of Italy. Finley thinks that the scheme's chief aim was the artificial bolstering of the ''political'' weight of Italy, as seen, for example, in the strictureheartily praised by Plinylaid down by Trajan that ordered all senators, even when from the provinces, to have at least a third of their landed estates in Italian territory, as it was "unseemly ..that heyshould treat Rome and Italy not as their native land, but as a mere inn or lodging house".

Scope

"Interesting and unique" as the scheme was, it remained small. The fact that it was subsidized by means of interest payments on loans made by landownersmostly large ones, assumed to be more reliable debtorsactually benefited a very low percentage of potential welfare recipients (Paul Veyne has assumed that, in the city of Veleia, only one child out of ten was an actual beneficiary)thus the idea, put forth by Moses I. Finley, that the grandiose aims amounted to at most a form of random charity, an additional imperial benevolence. Reliance solely on loans to great landowners (in Veleia, only some 17square kilometres were mortgaged) restricted funding sources even further. It seems that the mortgage scheme was simply a way of making local notables participate, albeit in a lesser role, in imperial benevolence. It is possible that the scheme was, to some extent, a forced loan, something that tied unwilling landowners to the imperial treasure in order to make them supply some funds to civic expenses. The same notion of exploiting privateand supposedly more efficientmanagement of a landed estate as a means to obtain public revenue was also employed by other similar and lesser schemes. The senator Pliny had endowed his city of Comum a perpetual right to an annual charge (''vectigal'') of thirty thousand sestertii on one of his estates in perpetuity even after his death (Pliny's heirs or any subsequent purchaser of the estate being liable), with the rent thus obtained contributing to the maintenance of Pliny's semi-private charitable foundation. With such a scheme, Pliny probably hoped to engender enthusiasm among fellow landowners for such philanthropic ventures. Trajan did likewise, but since "willingness is a slippery commodity", Finley suspects that, in order to ensure Italian landowners' acceptance of the burden of borrowing from the ''alimenta'' fund, some "moral" pressure was exerted.

In short, the scheme was so limited in scope that it could not have fulfilled a coherent economic or demographic purposeit was directed, not towards the poor, but to the community (in this case, the Italian cities) as a whole. The fact that the ''alimenta'' were expanded during and after the Dacian Wars and twice came on the heels of a distribution of money to the population of Rome (''congiaria'') following Dacian triumphs, points towards a purely charitable motive. The fact that the ''alimenta'' were restricted to Italy highlights the ideology behind it: to reaffirm the notion of the Roman Empire as an ''Italian'' overlordship. Given its limited scope, the plan was, nevertheless, very successful in that it lasted for a century and a half.

End

Roman prefect Titus Flavius Postumius Quietus was the last known official in charge of the Alimenta in 271 AD, during the reign of Aurelian. Pat Southern believes that if Aurelian "did suppress this food distribution system, he most likely intended to put into effect a more radical reform". Indeed, around this time, Aurelian reformed the Cura Annonae to replace the dole of grain by a dole of bread, salt and pork, as well as subsidized prices for other goods such as oil and wine.Pat Southern, ''The Roman Empire from Severus to Constantine''. London: Routledge, 2015, , page 181

References

Sources and Further Readings

*
*
*
*
*
*{{cite book, last=Veyne, first=Paul, title=Le Pain et le Cirque, location=Paris, publisher=Seuil, year=1976, isbn=978-2-02-004507-0, language=fr

Welfare in Italy
Agricultural economics
Economy of ancient Rome
Food politics
Education policy