Rome from the Sack of Veii to the Gallic Sack

Romans held that the Republican city was built almost instantly following the earlier city’s catastrophic destruction by Gauls in 390 BCE. Furthermore, the huge costs of rebuilding were held to cause socioeconomic frictions, effacing any gains made by Rome’s conquest of Veii in 396. While Rome’s economy appears stagnant and limited through the mid-fourth century, the reality of the Gauls’ total destruction of Rome is unacceptable, even accounting for an up-to-date view of the archaeology. Thus, it becomes necessary to find another explanation for Rome’s failure to follow up on the conquest of Veii. Looking closely at economic structures at the time, the chapter suggests that Rome faced an increasingly thin labor supply after expanding production into Veii’s territory. Labor became a real point of economic tension, but not because of the supposed labor-costs of rebuilding Rome from the ground up after the Gallic sack.