id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-4136		Roman commerce - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	4549	562	69	By the 1st century, the provinces of the Roman Empire were trading huge volumes of commodities to one another by sea routes. That is not to say that the acquisition of wealth was not to be desired, Pliny notes that a Roman man should by honorable means acquire a large fortune[27] and Polybius draws a comparison between the attitudes of Carthage and Rome towards profit from trade.[28] Thus starts the confusion in the role of the elite in trade as Terence writes that there is nothing wrong with large scale trade; it is in fact completely honorable and legitimate to import large quantities of product from around the world especially if it happens to lead to a successful trader buying land and investing in Roman agriculture; what is dishonorable is trade on a small scale.[29] Small trade is again shown as vulgar by Tacitus as he describes the involvement of Sempronius Gracchus in petty trade.[30]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-4136.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-4136.txt